Cory’s misadventure with the dope dealer synchs with Rob Morse’s lament in Sunday’s Chronicle.
That includes looking down, because there’s probably a human being, or human leavings, in the gutter. This is the most beautiful city in the world from a distance. Get up close, and you realize that “Why don’t we do it in the road” has the wrong meaning here.
This is the kind of thing that drives me completely nuts about San Francisco. There is visible corruption, felony crimes, and human degradation everywhere, far more so than any other city I’ve been to in North America or Europe (excluding Naples). There are people squatting and taking dumps, there are streets whose sidewalks are lined with tents and whose gutters are lined with sealed, fermenting 40 oz. malt liquor bottles filled with urine deposited by tent-dwellers who don’t want to live in their own piss. Everywhere you go in the city, you step through drifts of discarded pipes, needles, condoms.
The new guy in our group at work lives in the City. Friday, we were walking back from getting sandwiches, and he was revelling in the warmth of the South Bay sun. We talked about the differences between life in the City and down here. San Francisco’s different than other West Coast towns. It’s an East Coast city perched on a spit of rock. Its politics and patronage, as well as its Mayor (Lord William of San Francisco, Prince of the Faralons as my friend Cynthia says) are East Coast.
